State of the Industry and Promise of AI with Jeff Heckler | Episode 052

Link to Matik's Scale + CS Virtual Conference: https://bit.ly/scalecs-aturkovic.

Today, I'm joined by Jeff Heckler - a CS veteran with a lot of wisdom to share around the state of the industry, the AI tools with the most promise, and Slack overwhelm.

In this episode, we cover a wide variety of topics, including:

• 00:00:00 - Welcome To The Digital Customer Experience Podcast
• 00:01:31 - Join The Matik Conference, Earn A $20 Uber Eats Gift Card Giveaway
• 00:02:56 - Introduction
• 00:04:21 - Leaving Business Intelligence & Falling Into Software
• 00:10:17 - Digital Customer Success Since Covid-19
• 00:11:43 - The Rise Of QR Code
• 00:13:19 - Contraction In Headcounts And Budgets
• 00:14:51 - The Economics Of AI And Tech’s Current Struggles In Today’s Economy
• 00:16:26 - The Most Prominent Digital Trends In CS
• 00:19:36 - Leveraging Ai Chat Bots For Support Ticket Deflection, Among Other Things
• 00:20:58 - Communication Overload And Digital Emotions
• 00:22:29 - Optimizing Digital Workflows And Tools
• 00:23:58 - The Stickiness Of Tools
• 00:25:34 - Learning From Mistakes And Cross-Functional Allegiances
• 00:27:05 - Setting Up A Cadence For Product Sales Marketing Support
• 00:28:20 - Shifting Mindset For Customer Success Managers
• 00:29:36 - The Importance Of Cross Collaboration
• 00:31:01 - Shout Out To Dickey Singh And Cast.App

Enjoy! I know I sure did...

Jeff's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffheckler/

Shoutouts:

• Irit Eizips: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eizips/
• Dickey Singh of Cast.app: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dickey/

+++++++++++++++++

This episode was edited by Lifetime Value Media, a media production company founded by my good friend and fellow CS veteran Dillon Young.  Lifetime Value aims to serve the audio/video content production and editing needs of CS and Post-Sales professionals.  Lifetime Value is offering select services at a deeply discounted rate for a limited time.  Navigate to lifetimevaluemedia.com to learn more.

+++++++++++++++++

Chapters

• 0:03 Digital Customer Success Podcast Interview
• 12:26 Macroeconomic Trends and Digital Transformation
• 22:56 Digital CS Strategies and Collaborations

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

and the minute I did that, my coo said yeah, that's going to go over the market, oh good so yeah, uh, completely lost. You're welcome.

Speaker 2: 0:13

So yeah, well, exactly, I mean I did and, once again, welcome to the digital customer success podcast with me, alex trukovich, so glad you could join us here today and every week as I seek out and interview leaders and practitioners who are innovating and building great scaled CS programs. My goal is to share what I've learned and to bring you along with me for the ride so that you get the insights that you need to build and evolve your own digital CS program. If you'd like more info, want to get in touch or sign up for the latest updates, go to digitalcustomersuccesscom. For now, let's get started. Hello and welcome back to the Digital Customer Experience podcast. So great to see you.

Speaker 2: 0:55

It is episode 52 today and before we get started, I wanted to ask you to please bookmark your calendars for June 6th, because I'll be taking part in Maddox Scale and CS Summit. It's an online virtual event that's going to be taking place all about scaling CS, and there are so many incredibly talented people on the roster for this event. It's one not to be missed, and it's virtual, so you don't have to travel anywhere, which is great. If you sign up with a link that's down in the description or the show notes, the first five people will get a $20 Uber Eats gift card, which is pretty awesome because when you go to conferences during the breaks, you want some snacks, and so this way, you can order your own dang snacks for the summit. So, again, june 6th mark your calendars and check out the link that's in the description.

Speaker 2: 1:53

For today's episode, I'm joined by none other than Jeff Heckler, who I was pleased to have on the show because he's quite well known in the CS community, has a lot of great things to say. We talk about a bit of a state of the union of you know what he's seeing out there right now and you know specifically talking about. You know the economics of SaaS and how that's impacting digital, the proliferation of AI, and you know how that has a little bit of ways to go as well. We cover a fair amount of topics. So I really hope that you enjoy my conversation with Jeff Heckler today, because I sure did.

Speaker 2: 2:35

Dude, jeff, I appreciate you being on. I was excited to have you on because you're like one of those voices that's like continually in CS and you're a you know, you've, you're multi award winner and, uh, you, just you've, you've been a present voice in CS forever and, um, I think a lot of people really look up to your opinion and thought leadership on stuff. So obviously it was happy to have you on the show and I'm pleased that you um accepted my invitation.

Speaker 1: 3:07

Well, it's my pleasure. I um had the joy of listening to some of the uh, some of their pieces. You've done and surreal service to the community. So, um, delighted and and flattered to be here with you and some of the folks that have also contributed.

Speaker 2: 3:18

So, so you, you're the one who listened hey, there's a.

Speaker 1: 3:23

There are a lot of thumbs up on youtube. I can tell you from being there and watching.

Speaker 2: 3:27

So there's some I wanted to ask you, uh, a little bit about, obviously, your, your background. I'm starting out because I saw at first I got confused because I saw king's college on there. It's like what's homeboy doing going to school in london. But then I realized it wasn't that famous college, but I was LinkedIn stalking you, of course, and your career has taken an interesting, I think, arch over the last you know, 20 or so years and I noticed you spent a ton of time in BI, right, what was that arc that led you into BI and then that transition into CS, and I would imagine that the BI stuff has really served you well after.

Speaker 1: 4:10

You know that's not included on there is when I was a high school teacher before BI. We'll throw that in there. But no, I get into business intelligence through MicroStrategy, which is still out there and one of the tools that didn't get gobbled up in any sort of acquisition. That's because the CEO would never allow that to happen. But I got into software in the late 90s, which is an embarrassing amount of time ago. I really fell into the complex problem solving of it. A lot of chemistry, a lot of science and math in my background and that just kind of fit. I never.

Speaker 1: 4:50

When I was in college, the computer on campus were used for um writing papers. You know we just got out of word processing, yeah, processor. So, anyways, my roles in bi were customer facing and that was, um the biggest joy, and shoulder to shoulder with customers solving problems and getting getting to know their use cases. And so I now think about if customer success would have been around as early as it came on and I found it, I would have been in it. I got into customer success around 2011, 2012 for a similar thing, trying to solve business intelligence problems for a startup and then learning a little bit about customer success.

Speaker 1: 5:25

And then I came from a professional services background on the BI side and so talking to my leadership and saying if we sat with our customers and innate margin gave a little bit more on the PS side of way, we would have great feedback loops for our product.

Speaker 1: 5:41

And then it came with sales and marketing and so customer success for me as a person and my character and how I like to work with people just fits, and so that's where it really works. Two things I explain to my family and friends that aren't familiar with maybe even tech I sit in the Penn Station of my customers and my company and that kind of buzz and energy of my customers and my company and that kind of buzz and energy I feed off of, I hope I feed into it. And if I wasn't doing customer success in tech, I'd find a hot dog vendor on the corner and help them out with their customer lifecycle and journey. So it's just been great. You get to interact with so many different people every day. It's never anything the same thing twice, and so it's been a great life.

Speaker 2: 6:26

What you just said kind of um sparked something in my brain which is a lot of times on the show I've talked about with you know, with various guests. I've talked about this too, about how, like b2c I think needs to be more of a presence in b2b and I think customer success can learn a lot, especially digital cs can learn a lot from, from b2c. But you're you're mentioning of the hot dog vendor kind of sparked that thing which is like what you know, why do you think that customer success is so focused on tech and why does it not so kind of prevalent in other industries like manufacturing and stuff like that?

Speaker 1: 7:05

I'll be devil's advocate and think b2c the company's vendors are so much closer to their customer. Yeah, so I I think there's part of it there. Um, and in tech, dealing with so many different unless you're hyper verticalized as a product, um, you're dealing with so many different use cases and and trying to go to market in that way, I think, oh gosh, I'll get myself in trouble. But PLG has also thrown more of a problem into it. So, tech one of the big things is you have startups in tech and early mid-stage companies that are still trying to figure their way to the GTM and they use customer success as not a feedback loop but as a bridge and as just a second tier of support.

Speaker 1: 7:48

And so all of those common problems that we've heard of and know of and lived through. It's just been more of, at times, a crutch, a kind of a hodgepodge Venn diagram of professional services meets support. Let's throw customer success in there as turn. In terms of head count and cost, you can do it generally at a better rate than you would a ps org and just slightly above what you could do with a support org. And I'm not I'm talking in vast generalities, but that standing up a cs org and and the flexibility to it. You can pivot it and you can evolve an iterator really rapidly.

Speaker 2: 8:22

It doesn't have a form, um like a support or a ps org, so that's yeah, because I mean in in ps, you know I mean the majority of ps lives in times and materials world. At that point it becomes a almost a red tape bureaucratic situation to throw more ps at it, you know, at a customer and within cs2 it's got.

Speaker 1: 8:43

You know this is also double-edged, as you can go, you know cogs with or you go op-ex and yeah sure, or you can split it and so you know finance. People see a lot of opportunity there yeah, I agree.

Speaker 2: 8:56

Well, um, you know you've I think you've obviously been in cs long enough to where you've experienced a lot in terms of the genesis of CS over the years, and this is the Digital CS Podcast, and we've been on this really big wave of digital over the last I don't know few years. Really, I guess I would ask first off, obviously, what is your elevator pitch of digital CS? How would you describe it in lay terms?

Speaker 1: 9:24

We live in digital age and CS really hinges on delivering seamless and personalized experiences at scale. So data automation, which is continually growing in our opportunities through digital channels, which is the software's, tooling, the processes to guide customers proactively through their journey, and onboarding, adoption, expansion, renewal and advocacy. And so that's, that's the, the why, a little bit of the how, more of the why. Reducing churn, driving value realization, particularly first, value and value milestones along the customer journey. Then we go back to the last part of it, advocacy, fostering loyalty, turning customers into raving fans and flywheel growth engines for companies. So digital CS is a must-have. I think it kind of morphed from a scale than DCS along the way. Also, as I say, scale, that scale sometimes gets run over in the street now by digital. That's also important to keep in mind.

Speaker 2: 10:42

Yeah, it's so true. I think COVID had obviously a lot of side effects, no pun intended, or maybe pun intended, I think, one of the things in CS obviously, we saw massive shifts in the job market. We saw this kind of fundamental shift in CS where, you know, all of a sudden now we're not throwing bodies at a CS org as we used to do, which is probably a good thing and people have gotten more used to being digital and being remote and being connected that way and using chatbots and things like that. For me, one of the things that I find fascinating is the evolution of the QR code, which is like it was this really cool thing for a while, and then it became kind of this thing where, like you know why are you going to use a QR code. Which is like it was this really cool thing for a while, and then it became kind of this thing where, like ah, you know why are you going to use a QR code? Like that's stupid. In fact, in one org I was building like an employee onboarding program and we were doing like a QR code scavenger hunt where people would go around and they would scan a QR code. They'd see a video from the CFO or see a whatever. And even then this was maybe 10 years ago it was like, yeah, okay, that's kind of cool, but also kind of not. And then, all of a sudden, covid hits and every restaurant has their menu on a QR code and whatever. It's just being used all over the place because it's actually a cool tool and I think digital CS probably stands to benefit from that.

Speaker 2: 12:01

I don't know where I'm going with that, but what do you make of? You know the state of cs today. You've been in the industry for a while. You've seen things evolve. Obviously, the digital is is a huge wave at the moment. What, what's the state of things based on what you're seeing?

Speaker 1: 12:18

state of things. Uh gosh, I pressure. I guess I had to say word of the day in all directions. Let's think about the macroeconomics for a minute, because this is where all the things for the vast majority are coming from. I think you're on your growth rates from 2020, 2022, growth rates were in the low 30s and then last year almost halved, so in the high teens for public SaaS companies. So that's massive Median net retention fallen over the same period of time by over 10 percentage points from roughly 120, which used to be okay 120 is kind of like baseline down to 110.

Speaker 1: 13:06

And then companies used to get their cap back in 12 to 18 on average months, and now we're looking at three years. So that's where you know investors are looking and saying, well, that's not sitting around waiting for long term, looking at three to five years just in generalities to move investments and then, if I've got to wait for a cap to come back at over three years and something has got to change so that all just comes down and trickles down. I think there's, you see, a lot of contraction in headcount, see a lot of contraction of budgets and see a lot of M&A activity around this, not just in CS and SAS, but across the board in other companies, giant companies that are not SaaS, and tech and outside tech. And then the most simplistic thing we've all heard is a million times, but, as you mentioned, more with less, and that's where some of the digital stuff gets more eyeballs in it. Ai has gotten a ton of oxygen, uh, just basically out of hope. Um, I mean there's, there's some stuff there. It's like kind of grasping at a lever.

Speaker 2: 14:18

Yeah, for sure. I mean, you know I want to get back to the uh, you know, to the macroeconomic discussion here in a bit. But from an AI perspective, there's some cool stuff. There's no doubt about that. There's some really cool stuff that's happening in AI, but we're not there yet.

Speaker 2: 14:41

This coming together of like predictive, prescriptive, generative models to where, like, there's a end all be all of how we're going to use AI Right now it's a bunch of tools and those bunch of tools are trying to figure out, like, where they want to live and what they want to do, and it'll be interesting to see where that comes together and help solve some of those problems. But, like you know, back to the economics of things. You know it's a confusing time, I think, for a lot of people, because indications are that the economy is doing relatively well at the moment right, but SaaS seems to be like this straggler and tech seems to be a straggler. Do you feel like that's just kind of lagging behind and waiting for this wave? Or do you feel like it's just kind of lagging behind and waiting for this wave, or do you feel like it's a new normal?

Speaker 1: 15:32

I think it's more new normal than lag, and I say that because I look back at history that I've experienced. So 9-11, housing crisis, tech bubble, housing crisis, tech bubble and so it changes. When you go through periods like this, there are certain experiences where it changes behavior on a level that's not going to be waved off. These are this is scar tissue that's going to sit with us, and so there's no one now creating a org. Um, and this is any customer facing org is not looking at maximum efficiencies, tooling and digital scale before they look at well, I'm going to headcount my way through this. Not even a sales orgs you can look at taking less headcount up in quota and up in compensation and just seeing how it rolls outside of models that we never would have looked at two years ago.

Speaker 2: 16:34

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 16:36

That's why I'm saying it.

Speaker 2: 16:37

Yeah, happening across the board, which makes digitization all the more important. Doing that more with less. Are there some strong trends that you're seeing in digital Things that you've seen, like new platforms or people doing some really innovative, unique things that you've seen?

Speaker 1: 17:00

I think well, before we go into the new stuff, I think some of the things that have been working we see really growing in their efficacy call recording analysis, moving on to not just next steps but writing your comms for you, aggregating those and looking at what feedback can we give back to what we used to do not so long ago all of this by hand. We had some reporting in tools. But we used to do not so long ago all of this by hand. Primarily, we had some reporting in tools, but it wasn't great. And now you have, rapidly you have these tools that can do analysis and an aggregation for you at such a scale that really matters. Especially if you have anywhere above 10,000, 20,000 customers. You need some critical mass of data to make it play. But I just think and coming back just a little bit, some of the CS folks that are digital CS right now, outside of tools and real constructs, is there are tens of thousands of CS professionals who roll up their sleeves every day, get into one of the Gen AI tools and maximize the heck out of their time and then take this and templatize it and share it within their orgs to make mass communication a thing. So those things I think are to be applauded. Mass communication, I think. So those things I think are to be applauded.

Speaker 1: 18:29

There's a lot of sweat equity that's going into how digital CS is being carried out and the empathy of how we're utilizing AI and other tools on a day-to-day. I think, going further with digital CS and trans self-service, which was generally async stuff that we would look at kind of steal from support or maybe use in conjunction with marketing, I think the self-service options have gotten really much wider in their usage Hyperpersonalization, coming from a lot of sales methodologies as well, but also integration with some of the tooling that's coming out and some tech that's out now. Social media, kind of in the same basket, but also not with how people are utilizing Slack. It's gotten a lot more traction. There's a lot of hesitation in how to use Slack and how to not get overburdened from it and just turn on a fire hose, but there's been good methodology around that. And then sales engagement tools, which have been beneficial to really staying in touch with the same head of the company.

Speaker 2: 19:37

Funny you say that because it's like the common gripe is that in CS we have so few CS specific built tools, so we've got to leverage all these sales tools and hack around them to make them work on the post sale. But yeah, you mentioned a lot of really great things and I do find a lot more orgs installing AI chatbots, which is super cool when you can train your chatbot on your community and your knowledge base and that wealth of knowledge that's there. I think that gets into, obviously, support ticket deflection and things like that. There are a couple of people I've been talking to where the best practice seems to be launch that thing internally first, let your internal teams use it first, poke holes in it, make sure it's serving up the right information, but then also use it as a tool to help you do your job more effectively, because I think so much of digital isn't and you've touched on this so much of digital isn't just customer facing. It's building those efficiencies internally and those call transcripts and writing recap emails and it's like all those things that we're doing on a daily basis, a repeated basis, where we can see a lot of efficiency. So that's cool and, yeah, slack is an interesting one.

Speaker 2: 20:50

I had Ralphie English on the podcast half a year ago, I don't know so whenever that was and she is in an interesting scenario where, like she doesn't have a platform, you know she can't do in-app messaging, it's an api and so, yeah, her, their, her primary method of communication with customers is slack, for better or for worse, I think. I think you can get into overwhelm real quick with slack too, though.

Speaker 2: 21:17

What happens internally? Yeah, I mean I don't know. You know I've lost track of how many channels I'm in and I've lost track of how many channels I'm in and I've lost track of how many notifications I've ignored notification overload. I always like to ask if you've seen any like digital emotions in your everyday life that you've been kind of like impressed by, or you've kind of experienced and you've been like, oh, I know what that is.

Speaker 1: 21:45

Yeah, I think for the audience listening, I'll come back to sales engagement tools. So, using something like Sales Loft or Marketo and I say that because it's got a wide reach and you're using IP that already exists and hopefully, you know content can also be utilized as well from marketing and sales, and so I think that's for a lot of folks that are probably in your audience those are good places to start and get a big bang for your buck, provided you have solid journey mapping and provided you have content which is, you know, right message, right time, right person. We're not trying to get into the, you know, wave my hand in the air so you can see me, but really look at, you know what milestones and what points of value can I drive at particular moments in the life cycle, so that one I would say with a wide swath of coverage can do. And if you're looking at budgeting, it's already in-house so it might just be a slight addition and it's already been approved into security and so you have a lot of upside there.

Speaker 2: 22:56

I love the scrappiness that digital CS folks have. It's just like what data do we have? What tools do we have? One top tip that I've heard a couple of times now is make best friends with your IT people, because they know every SaaS application that exists within the org and who has it, Because chances are, if you're looking at Calendly, somebody already has Calendly. Or if you're looking at whatever, somebody's got it or something in the family, right, yeah, yeah yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 23:26

I mean, we had a practical example of that recently where we were literally looking at purchasing Calendly I think it was Calendly, and you know we're a Microsoft shop. So it was like well, does M365 have something? And yes, it does, it's called booking and it works just fine. Yeah, Integrates with all your stuff that you already have. Whether you love or hate the Microsoft ecosystem, they've got it.

Speaker 1: 23:53

Well, there's a reason why it's an ecosystem. There's a reason why they'll acquire a tool and throw it in for free.

Speaker 2: 24:00

That's right, absolutely Make it sticky and it's. I mean, those things are hard to rip out right. I mean, if you, I've actually been through a Google to Microsoft transition and it's atrocious, and it's probably atrocious on purpose.

Speaker 1: 24:19

Yeah, ripple place is supposed to be painful.

Speaker 2: 24:35

Have you always loved to learn from not only my mistakes, but I love learning from other people's mistakes and things that I see around me. But are there any massive blunders that you've seen people do digitally where you're like, oh God, shouldn't have done that or didn't quite land the way you wanted it to?

Speaker 1: 24:54

you wanted it to. You know the one that I that I made um, I was first getting into to looking at content and cs and um, how we were going to own it. And you know I had great journey mapping, process maps and I was like, all right, now we're going to do. And I had built this cs ops teams and added some headcounts of these teams, really kind of outside the full, like an internal trainer just for CS sitting in Ops, data analyst, which isn't new, but it was then project management and stuff like that Sitting in Ops, cs Ops, not RevOps.

Speaker 1: 25:25

And so my next step was to do content and so wrote the JD, worked out the RACI and all this and I called it customer success, marketing. And the minute I did that, my COO said, yeah, that's going to go over to marketing. Oh, good, yeah, completely lost that one, you're welcome. Good, yeah, completely lost that one, you're welcome. Well, exactly, I mean, I did it with a smile on my face and very quickly because I knew where I had gone and I was like, well, that's just, you know, going to have to learn from that one. That was a big one which doesn't sound huge, but when you're flying down the highway at, you know, 140 miles an hour. Um, that would have been key to to getting to where we're going.

Speaker 2: 26:14

And then, having lost complete control of it, um, but handing it over I did, happily, but uh and and you know you've probably been hyping it with the team and all this stuff, like they're all like in it.

Speaker 1: 26:26

No, I I'm pretty good at trumpeting something until it's ready to go, but I think some other things that I wish I would have learned more quickly how important cross-functional allegiances and alliances are, building initiatives that are going to cross, pollinate and work for everyone, for everyone. Yeah, sharing clips of of calls um cross-functionally carries so much value for how you're trying to advocate for customers or trying to provide feedback across across the board. Those are two things that come to tell me more about that.

Speaker 2: 27:03

How did that look? What did that look like tactically? How would you go about doing that? Because that involves going back to the recording and clipping out a segment and distributing. That's time right regular cadences with.

Speaker 1: 27:15

You're aggregating, you're saying here's the AR or the MRR that we have at risk with these top key issues and give me your top five. And we're doing this biweekly or we're doing this monthly and we're all tracking on it. And there's ownership and you have executive sponsor that's sitting over this and making sure, hawkishly, that everyone's doing what they're supposed to be doing and owning. And then coming back from that and saying I, I'm going to put this in, you just throw it in the spreadsheet. But you've got to get your team into, whether it's even anecdotal or it's sentiment.

Speaker 1: 27:57

If you don't have an object in your crm or your csp where you're coding this stuff, it's like, okay, here's the issue and I have ears to it. If you have some call recording software that you can do keyword stuff, that that's helpful. But it's really about your team, your CS team, identifying and being with you, even if they're not there, but sharing this with the team and saying here's the top five things that we're reporting back to support, here's the top five things that we're reporting to marketing and flagging those. And then getting the snippet and saying here it is and sharing that as high as you can to get visibility into it. So that's the tactic.

Speaker 2: 28:34

That's cool. It's a mindset shift, right. Because as a CSM, going into a call, you're prepping for the call. You have things you want to hit or whatever, but then, as the call is happening, you kind of almost have to have this thing in the back of your brain that says we need to grab that out of there, because if you're not thinking about it, then going back to it is it's makes it definitely harder.

Speaker 1: 28:58

Well, and for the csm, the amount of empowerment that you give to them and that they can express the share to the customer. I'm going to take exactly what you just said and I'm going to share that because we have these biweekly or monthly updates with support or product and they're going to get this in that 15 minutes. It's 15 seconds of what you just said. They're going to hear directly and so the customer can say I can't hold myself, my company, accountable for what might come out of it, but I know that you'll be there.

Speaker 2: 29:27

That's so cool. I love that because you're right that cross-collaborative work is something that is kind of inherent in the nature of cs in general. But then if you're building these digital strategies on top of that stuff, you got to make sure it aligns with like, okay, when is marketing communicating certain things and what inputs do they need from the customer, and when is product doing xyz and and of that kind of stuff. So cross collaboration is huge In my opinion. I've been actually writing about it in the newsletter, so if you're not subscribed to the newsletter, go subscribe to the newsletter. Speaking of newsletters, I want to you know, as we kind of start to wrap up our convo, I'd love to understand what you're paying attention to. What's your content diet, what are your books, podcasts, what are you ingesting?

Speaker 1: 30:16

I'll start. I guess the highest level of stuff I listen to broadly there's. Scott Galloway has a podcast called Prof G Sastra Podcast. So broad to SaaS, to CS. Yes, most people have heard of Lincoln Murphy abroad to sass, to cs, cs. Um, most people have heard of lincoln murphy. So lincoln murphy and his colleague, uh, johan nelson, do impact weekly, which is really solid. It's great at every level of cs, the things that they cover. Dave kellogg's kell blog a lot of people know that. Yeah, so those, those are some things that I find immense amount of value out of.

Speaker 2: 30:48

That's a good collection, for sure. Yeah, that Kell blog is spot on.

Speaker 1: 30:52

I had the fortune of working at Business Objects while he was our CMO. That's where a big point in time at that period of time, we went from being a tool to a platform, and that was before SaaS hit. That was a revolution.

Speaker 2: 31:13

Yeah for sure. Sure, that's cool. Do you want to give any shout outs to anybody who's like doing great things in digital or is particularly forward thinking in cs?

Speaker 1: 31:20

just recently listened to your podcast with um our friend reid is it and she was talking about some digital stuff and um use of digital personas, if I remember correctly, and there is a tool by a company called Castapp, led by CEO Diki Singh, and that opportunity there for not just CS, but I think there's other opportunities and the way the tool has grown and their offerings have grown. Those folks are doing some really great work. There's hyper-personalization, there's massive efficiencies, there's aggregation, there's some predictive in there, and so as a total package, it's something that is really eye-opening.

Speaker 2: 32:08

Yeah, I'm a huge cast fan fan, in fact, dickie was on the episode. I'm trying to see what uh, he was episode 40, um, so not too long ago. But he, he's like a breath of fresh air in cs and he I think part of the reason is he comes to it from an outsider's perspective. You know, lifelong engineer and he's just trying to solve some problems and see, you know, saw this, this problem that we've been talking about, like building economy into serving a customer the right way, and he's, he's doing a cool job and a bunch of ai stuff in the background there, so it's, that's super cool. Where can people find you? What have you been up to? Anything you want to plug like it's your time?

Speaker 2: 32:50

I'll just say anybody wants to connect um linkedin is the place and stuff that I think about gets dropped in yeah, cool, I love following you on linkedin and um love that you're here and thanks for sharing your knowledge and dealing with our connection issues that we've somehow battled through.

Speaker 1: 33:07

Well, thank, thank you alex and again for battled through Well. Thank you, alex, and again for what you do for the community. Thank you Much appreciated.

Speaker 2: 33:14

Yeah, for sure Appreciate it. Thank you for joining me for this episode of the Digital CX Podcast. If you like what we're doing, consider leaving us a review on your podcast platform of choice. If you're watching on YouTube, leave a comment down below. It really helps us to grow and provide value to a broader audience. You can view the Digital Customer Success Definition Wordmap and get more information about the show and some of the other things that we're doing at digitalcustomersuccesscom.

Speaker 2: 33:43

This episode was edited by Lifetime Value Media, a media production company founded by our good mutual friend, dylan Young. Lifetime Value aims to serve the content video audio production needs of the CS and post-sale community. They're offering services at a steep discount for a limited time. So navigate to lifetimevaluemediacom, go have a chat with Dylan and make sure you mention the Digital CX podcast sent you. I'm Alex Trukovich. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you next week.